Inheritance
by Kityye
Summary: The choice made in Heir caused this to happen. Can they ever change it?


Disclaimer: They be not mine! They be Marvel's! Angie, Logan, Peggy, and the twins are figments of my imagination. Genosha is Marvel's too.  
  
Author's note: This is completely dark. No language or anything, but very depressing.  
  
  
Inheritance  
  
She had been wrong, so wrong, and a coal of anger smoldered, waiting as she waited in the cell. The heavy collar around her neck pulled her irresistibly down, and the anger pushed her up. She nurtured it, vowed desperate vows, raged against THEM, and secretly began planning an escape.  
  
She had not thought it would be easy. For all the Hollywood videos she had watched, she had no illusions about what really escaping would be like. The movie version was completely opposite of what her prison really was.  
  
In a TV version, she would have gotten rid of the collar through the toothpick she kept in her purse, which the jailers had so considerately left with her. She would pick the lock which was rusty and old. She would slip out the back way, everyone looking in the opposite direction as she passed through the enemy ridden halls. Then she would go to the police, and everything would be all right.  
  
No one mentioned the shiny sliver locks that she couldn't reach anyway. Nobody thought to tell her about the windows that she could barely stick her fingertips out of. Nobody informed her that it would be dark. Nobody warned her that They would commit horrible, unimaginable crimes to her body. Nobody mentioned that she wouldn't be fed.   
  
THEY kept her here against her will. THEY took all her clothing. THEY sheared her long dark hair with her mother's skunk stripe. She was made to sleep on a cold, hard, rough concrete floor in an completely bare room. Her window had no glass, just iron bars set into the concrete wall so close together that she could not get her pinkie through them. The heavy collar on her neck somehow blocked her mutant powers, her Inheritance.   
  
To pass time, and to keep from freezing, she paced across the tiny room. Three large steps forward, spin, three steps back, turn, three steps, three steps, three steps, three steps, three steps....   
  
She wondered about her siblings and how they fared. She worried about them, all being younger than her fifteen years. All alone. As alone as her? No.   
  
Only one would be so inflexible as she is. Her brother, Logan, only four years younger than her. He might not give in to THEIR demands as she had not, but the others....   
  
The twins, a mere seven years old, would cry and wail if they were not kept together. They had a fighting chance if they submitted to THEIR will. They might be allowed to see each other.   
  
Her youngest sister, the one whose Inheritance had not come into maturity yet, she had no idea what had been done to her. Was she in these jail cells as well, a mere three year old?  
  
Her questions went unanswered. Every day she strained at the collar blocking her mutant power of telepathy. She worked methodically to get around it, checked at every turn. If only she was powerful enough to break its power.   
  
THEY came in. THEY wanted her to join THEM. It was so easy, THEY said, all you have to do is follow instructions. Oh, and by the way, you have to drink a special drink every morning. It tastes just like honey. You like honey. WE know. WE know everything. Everything about you. Everything about your family. WE will let you out. WE may even let you see your brothers and sisters. All you have to do is say yes. Say yes and come with US.  
  
She refused. One of THEM produced a whip. A regular horse whip. She had been expecting something else. She nearly laughed. Later, she was glad she hadn't....  
  
Nobody told me I would be beat, she thought mournfully as she lay on her stomach on the cold, hard, floor. Nobody told me.  
  
After, THEY teased her with information about what her parents had been like. Her Mom, THEY said, was a killer, a professional assassin. THEY said Daddy had been a "t'ief." THEY said that her parents had murdered hundreds of humans. THEY claimed that Mom could kill with her touch. She had never know what Mom's Inheritance had been. For all she knew, the information could be true. THEY told her that she had dozens of half brother and sisters out there. THEY could show her one, if she wanted. That it was easy. All of her parent's children inherited distinctive traits, personality or physical. Just as she had the skunk stripe.  
  
Slowly, she felt herself going mad. She no longer cared that her body's waste covered the floor because there was nowhere else to go to the bathroom. She no longer cared, indeed very rarely felt, that there were long, open wounds all over her body. She no longer could stir herself to sit up, much less to pace. Every day seemed more and more like a dream. Every day she thought less and less. THEIR voices filled her head no more. She didn't care. Not until the day the collar quit working.  
  
She didn't notice. Not until the returning of something, her Inheritance, that had been gone from the back of her mind and a sense of rejuvenation filled her. She tested it. It was true. For the first time in... in... a long time, she felt whole.   
  
On shaking arms, she pushed herself into a sitting position. Pain blossomed, filled her. She shunted the pain to the Inheritance. The collar.... She fought for control and barely kept the abomination around her neck from exploding. The collar fell from her shoulders.   
  
She directed the excess energy to the lock on the door, without monitoring it. Brightness filled her vision. When she could see again, the lock was gone. So was most of the door.  
  
She pushed her body into a standing position, using a measure of her power to steady herself and hold herself upright. On faltering feet, she ducked through the hole in the door into the corridor. Others cried out to her. She peeked inside each cell, looking for something - someone - all the while scanning with her mutant power. She found one with it, and followed the directions it gave her to... she wasn't sure, but it was someone important.   
  
She stood in the doorway of a fancy room, staring. A young girl played with china dolls at the foot of a woman dressed in rich clothing who was knitting. The child had long auburn hair and such dark eyes that they looked black. She was clothed in a rich dress with her hair back in clips. The child's name came to her, Peggy. Her baby sister wore a collar, a smaller, more delicate one, but a collar. She remembered more, and turned away from the happy scene. A startled cry came from behind her.   
  
Without looking back, she ruthlessly wiped the woman's mind and colored her sister's view of her so that the child thought she saw her elder sister just as she had been before they had been caught, along with the fact that she was Peggy's older sister. Peggy gawked at her, then reached up and pulled on the skirts of the woman. The woman gathered the child into her lap and smoothed her hair as Peggy babbled about seeing "Angie" in the doorway. The woman looked at her and told the young girl that there was nobody there and to go back to playing.  
  
With tears in her eyes, the person, no, she didn't feel like a person, the non-person, that the young girl had called "Angie" so affectionately left. Relentlessly her Inheritance pushed her on. It covered her in the illusion that she was a guard, and led her to an outdoor area. Men, women, and children hacked rocks out of a sheer cliff face and carried them to a wall. There the blocks were lifted up to the top, one by one making the prison more inescapable. The illusion covering her changed so that she was one of the prisoners, all of whom wore the collars.   
  
She was shoved roughly by her Inheritance to one corner where two children, younger than most, worked, cuffed together by the hand and foot, creating some sort of two headed, three armed, three legged monster. Their ragged hair fell in their face. It took her a moment, but finally she recognized them to be a boy and a girl. Again, she did not know them, yet she did. The boy stumbled and pulled the girl down, but she helped him up, also on one knee. Together they scooped the rock they had cut into their three arms and staggered to the wall.   
  
The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell freely. These too were her family, her brother and sister, twins. Even in her wildest dreams she had not thought that the twins would be forever doomed to be together in such a manner. Her grief was such that her anger could no longer sustain her power and the illusion began to falter.  
  
Blinded by tears she began to lurch away, unable to see, yet still guided by her Inheritance. There was one last thing you must see, it told her, one last thing you must see, then you can rest forever.  
  
When she had regained her senses she stood outside a cell exactly like her own. She was frightened, but she was no longer in control. Her Inheritance had seized her body and her own hand opened the door. Even as she did so, she knew who this was, why she had been forced to come here. Her torment eased in light of this discovery and her Inheritance surrendered authority to her as it realized she would not run.  
  
She fell into her brother Logan, her power drained past all limits. Somehow he had been waiting for her. Somehow. All illusion lost, she no longer cared about modesty. He had been treated as her.  
  
She began to babble. "Logan. So glad to see you. The others are okay. Loge'. I failed. I failed."  
  
He smoothed her hair back from her face and rocked her in his arms awkwardly, his brother anger roused at the treatment his elder sister had received.  
  
"Logan, you have to be leader now."  
  
He sagged against the wall, his elder sister propped up against him. Her eyes closed, her breathing ragged. He had to lean close to hear her.  
  
"Loge', I love you. I love... you all. Don't give... in. Please."  
  
Her head rolled down on his chest and she let out a long sigh.   
  
"I love you too," he whispered in her ear.  
  
Minutes passed. Feet scuffled in the hall. THEY had discovered that she had escaped. She didn't move. A bitter realization hit him then, and he dropped the corpse of his elder sister. He scuttled to the corner and threw up, not noticing when the guards entered his cell and removed the body.   
  
It was not until he lay flat on his dirty concrete floor after THEY had beat him yet again, this time for "conspiring" with his sister, that the coal his beloved "Angie" had planted in his soul burst into flame and he began planning.  
  
  
  
What do you think? Read and Review! 


End file.
